For the first-ever visit of the 24 Hours of LeMons to Sebring International Raceway, we learned that not many racers are willing to brave the conditions of sultry central Florida in July, and even fewer are willing to anger their families by obliterating a holiday weekend via a hooptie race. We inspected a mere 28 cars on Friday (the previous race had 120), the smallest field since the surrealism-in-the-cane-fields Cain’t Git Bayou 2011 race in Louisiana, and half of those had blown up by mid-Saturday. It turns out that only the most demented devoted racers laugh at 100° temperatures and 100% humidity, which meant that the first-ever Humidi TT had plenty of quality in spite of the small quantity. Let’s check out the teams that took home trophy hardware.

Strangely, the team that sweated the Floridiots the hardest was another Porsche, the 1984 928 of Come Monday Motorsports. This shooting-brake 928 has been racing in LeMons for many years, starting its career in California and then migrating to the East Coast. As you might imagine, the terrifying complexity of this big, heavy, slushbox-equipped machine means that even the smallest mechanical ailment tends to knock it out of contention (not to mention the jetliner-grade fuel consumption), but it’s quite fast— in this case, the quickest car of the weekend at Sebring— when everything works correctly. This race, the Come Monday 928 drivers took advantage of their car’s power to knock out lap times a full five seconds better than the Floridiot Motorsports 944, grabbing the P1 spot late on Sunday… and then the engine exploded in spectacular fashion.

In Class B, we had a dramatic win from a team that has been chasing a seemingly impossible class win since 2009. The members of Duff Beer Racing have broken just about every component of their ’94 Honda Civic at least a half-dozen times over the course of their five-year LeMons South Region racing career, but this time their D16 kept all its reciprocating hardware inside the block, no suspension parts snapped like pretzel sticks, no Crown Victorias punted the Civic into a tire wall, and electrical fires failed to materialize.

Here’s what the Duff Beer car looked like way back in its debut race, the South Fall 2009 event. Note the bright and shining paint, the un-smashed body panels, the optimism. Today it resembles the sort of Civic you’ll find abandoned and on fire under a freeway overpass in Bakersfield, but who cares? Class B winners, by a huge 18-lap margin, and P3 overall!

The jealousy among the other Southern Class B racers may trigger another paddock tire-slashing incident for the Duff Beer team, but it will be worth it.

Offering vivid proof that slow-and-steady wins the race, the Class C trophy went to the slowest car on the track. Out of seven Class C competitors, the Idle Clatter 1979 Mercedes-Benz 300D crept around the power-favoring Sebring course in the most tortoise-like fashion, with a best lap of 3:29.827 versus 3:03.973 for the fastest Class C team (and 2:44.861 for the Come Monday Motorsports Porsche 928). As the weekend wore on, Class C car after Class C car pitted with various hardware and/or team-organization woes while the Idle Clatter Benz just kept chugging along. When the checkered flag came out, Idle Clatter had won the class by a comfortable six laps, adding a class win to their glorious Index of Effluency win.

The second-slowest car of the Humidi TT deserves mention here, if only because the NSF/Sputnik Racing 1971 Plymouth Fury pulled off the impossible-seeming feat of being even worse than NSF’s previous car. We don’t have room to list all the things that went wrong with this profoundly terrible Chrysler, but this video sums it up pretty well.

Speaking of profoundly terrible Chryslers, LeMons fans around the globe were overjoyed to see that two Chrysler Sebrings were on hand to compete at their namesake race track. We arranged for a 15-1/2 Hours of Sebrings trophy, in honor of a similarly named but less prestigious event at the same venue, and NSF Racing and Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws each obtained a dead-stock, low-mile Chrysler Sebring JXi convertible for the occasion. Even with new-for-LeMons 1999 and 2000 model-year cars, equipped with 161-horsepower Mitsubishi V6s under their hoods, the Sebrings were put into Class C with the likes of the Idle Clatter diesel Mercedes-Benz and the Team Fairlylame 1964 Ford Fairlane… and were beaten by both. Still, one of the Sebrings suffered slightly fewer maddeningly undiagnosable mechanical problems during the weekend, and that was the ’00 Sebring of Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws.

With 161 total laps, P16 overall, and third in class, the Speedycop Sebring beat its NSF rival by six laps. With incredible parts availability and pretty good power, we think a Sebring could be developed into a decent enough LeMons racer, but NSF prefers Mopars of an earlier vintage and put their ’99 up for sale immediately after the race. For $1,200, which is a very good deal for a caged, running, nearly-race-ready LeMons car (safety gear doesn’t count against the $500 budget), this lovely gold Chrysler could be yours!

The Judges’ Choice trophy was placed into the hands of Team Infinniti, who will probably end up welding it to the hood of their much-smashed Infiniti J30. This team got into Class B by mistake, then didn’t complain one bit when the LeMons Supreme Court caught their own mistake and kicked the team up into Class A.

Team Infinniti has some of the best drivers in the South/Gulf LeMons Regions and their J30 (which is more or less a sedan version of the Z32 Nissan 300ZX) is just as quick as the other Class A teams. Many Class A teams pack up and leave when some mechanical ailment knocks their car out of contention, but that didn’t happen when the J30’s automatic transmission disintegrated early in Saturday’s race session. Instead, Team Infinniti found a replacement transmission, spent several hours swapping it, and got back on the track, keeping a good sense of humor about the whole thing. The LeMons Supreme Court justices approve of this, so much so that we awarded the Judges’ Choice to these guys.

Another factor in the Most Heroic Fix award decision was Roland’s troublesome RX-7. This car has averaged about five laps during its previous few races, and this time Roland and his Team Neveready got it running well enough to get 97 laps and P22 (out of 27 cars that started).

For the self-explanatory I Got Screwed award, the 24 Hours of LeMons Chief Perpetrator, Jay Lamm, decided that the low turnout and resulting negative cash flow meant that he was the most screwed of all this time. Mr. Lamm doesn’t share accounting details with your LeMons correspondent— no doubt wishing to discourage any agitation to improve his groats-and-gruel wages to the LeMons Supreme Court— but he was heard to grumble that he could have purchased himself a nice new German sports car with the money he lost putting on a 27-car race at a prestige track 3,000 miles from home. Screwed!

The team that seems to symbolize the spirit of the 24 Hours of LeMons the most, that makes the jaded organizers smile whenever they catch sight of that team’s car, gets the coveted Organizer’s Choice award. This time, the rookie Saab 900 pilots of Team Formula None earned the Organizer’s Choice by showing up with a Swedish-flag-colored Saab sporting a mishmash of Swedish Fish and IKEA theming, failing the tech inspection on multiple counts, and thrashing uncomplainingly to get their car race-legal.

The top prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, goes to the team that beats the odds by accomplishing the most with the most unlikely car. This time, Team Fairlylame and their 1964 Ford Fairlane sedan ran away with the big prize, finishing 175 laps, clawing their way to 13th place, nearly winning Class C, and (perhaps most important) defeating their longtime rival, the 1964 Dodge Dart of Escape Velocity Racing.

The Fairlylame Fairlane wasn’t anything approaching fast, but it finished in the top half of the standings and looked great doing so. Congratulations, Team Fairlylame!